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Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 96 (2007) 87–106

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Learning of letter names follows similarprinciples across languages: Evidence from Hebrew

Rebecca Treiman a,*, Iris Levin b, Brett Kessler a

a Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, USAb School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

Received 19 May 2006; revised 25 August 2006Available online 12 October 2006

Abstract

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learninghave examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their pat-terns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-namingdata from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal reading instruction: a younger group (meanage 5 years 2 months) and an older group (mean age 6 years 2 months). Children’s errors ofteninvolved letters with similar shapes or letters adjacent to one another in the alphabet. Most Hebrewletter names are not very similar to one another phonologically, and there were fewer phonologicallybased confusions than in English. We found both general frequency effects and frequency effects thatreflected the letters in individual children’s names. On average, girls knew more letter names than didboys. The results suggest that letter name learning follows similar principles across languages.� 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Letters; Letter names; Letter shapes; Alphabet learning; Hebrew; English; Sex differences; Cross-linguistic studies

Introduction

Children in literate societies are surrounded by print from an early age. They start tolearn about some aspects of their writing system even before formal instruction in reading

0022-0965/$ - see front matter � 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2006.08.002

* Corresponding author. Fax: +1 314 935 7588.E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Treiman).

mailto:[email protected]

88 R. Treiman et al. / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 96 (2007) 87–106

and writing begins. For example, children learn that writing is composed of units that arearranged along a line and that writing differs from drawing in these and other ways (e.g.,Levin & Bus, 2003). Children also learn that people refer to the units of writing by con-ventional names. The first (leftmost) letter of BOOK is called /bi/, for example, and thefirst (rightmost) letter in the Hebrew equivalent /sefer/ is called /samex/. (For anexplanation of the phonetic symbols used in this article, see International Phonetic Asso-ciation, 1999.) Preschoolers learn about the names of letters through activities such assinging songs that include the letter names and talking with parents about the letters intheir own names and other words (e.g., Aram & Levin, 2002; Levin & Aram, 2004). Inthe work reported here, we focused on letter names as one important aspect of emergentliteracy.

At first, children appear to learn about the names of letters in much the same way asthey learn about other words in the vocabulary of their language (Treiman, Kessler, & Pol-lo, 2006). The link between the phonological form /bi/ and the shape B is arbitrary, justlike the link between the label /skwer/ and the shape h. Both links must be memorized.After letter names are known, however, children can learn from the names in a way thatthey cannot learn from labels such as square. Children can use the fact that most letternames are phonetically iconic; that is, letter names contain the sounds that the letters rep-resent (Treiman & Kessler, 2003). English-speaking children can use their knowledge ofthe name of B to help learn that this letter stands for /b/, and Hebrew-speaking childrencan use their knowledge of the name of , /samex/, to help learn that this letter has thesound /s/ (e.g., Levin, Shatil-Carmon, & Asif-Rave, 2006; Share, 2004; Treiman, Tincoff,Rodriguez, Mouzaki, & Francis, 1998). Knowledge of letter names appears to boost pho-nemic sensitivity as well as knowledge of letter sounds, thereby promoting the acquisitionof alphabetic literacy (for a review, see Foulin, 2005). Given the role of letter names in thedevelopment of reading and spelling, we need to learn more about how children acquiretheir knowledge of letter names in the first place. Such work can inform us about the pro-cesses involved in letter name learning and the factors that influence performance. Thefindings should have practical applications as well, for example in designing curriculafor young children.

Much of the existing data on young children’s learning of letter names come from chil-dren in the United States. For example, researchers have examined the numbers of letternames known by U.S. children of different ages and have compared performance onuppercase and lowercase letters (e.g., Worden & Boettcher, 1990). Researchers have alsoexamined the factors that make some letter shape–letter name pairs easier for children tolearn than other letter shape–letter name pairs (e.g., Treiman & Kessler, 2003). Beforedrawing strong conclusions about the factors that affect children’s learning of letter names,however, it is important to examine children outside the United States. We must ensurethat our conclusions are not limited to one particular alphabet, language, or culture.

Treiman and colleagues (2006) carried out an initial cross-linguistic study of letter namelearning by examining English-speaking children in the United States and Portuguese-speaking children in Brazil. Data were collected on a letter-naming task from more than300 children in each country. The analyses reported by Treiman and colleagues focused onreplacement errors, that is, cases in which children mistakenly labeled one letter with aname that was appropriate for another letter. For example, children sometimes calledW by the name of M, an error that reflects the similarity between these letters’ shapes.However, visual similarity was not the only factor that influenced replacement errors.

R. Treiman et al. / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 96 (2007) 87–106 89

Phonological similarity was influential as well in that children were especially likely to con-fuse a pair of similar-looking letters if their names were also similar, as with B and D. Thisled to some differences in the specific errors committed by U.S. and Brazilian childrenbecause letters that have similar names in one language do not always have similar namesin the other language. Performance was also affected by letter frequency, both general fre-quency and occurrence of letters in individual children’s own names. The U.S. children,but not the Brazilian children, were significantly more likely to confuse letters that wereadjacent to one another in the alphabet than to confuse letters that were not adjacentto one another. For example, U.S. children sometimes called F by the name of G eventhough these letters are not very similar in their shapes or names.

The results of Treiman and colleagues (2006) suggest that the early learning of letternames follows many of the same principles that apply to vocabulary learning in general.One important part of vocabulary learning is identifying which objects should be placedin the same category and given the same label. With letters, as with many concrete objects,children appear to form their categories largely on the basis of shape (e.g., Clark, 1993).Another important ingredient of vocabulary learning is frequency of exposure, with rep-etition being required to fix arbitrary associations in memory. With letters, some aspects offrequency apply to all children (children generally have more opportunities to learn aboutthe name of O than about the name of Q) and some aspects are individual (a child namedZoe has more opportunities to learn about Z than do other children). Because languagesdiffer in their letter names, letter frequencies, and other factors, the specific letters that areconfused most often in one country are not necessarily the same letters that are confusedmost often in another country. However, Treiman and colleagues (2006) suggested that thesame general principles explain the patterns.

Stronger support for the idea that the same factors affect the learning of letter namesacross languages would come from studying a script different from that used by the Eng-lish and Portuguese languages examined by Treiman and colleagues (2006). Both Englishand Portuguese use letters of the Latin alphabet. The U.S. and Brazilian names of the let-ters are similar in some respects, deriving as they do from the Latin names. The similarresults that Treiman and colleagues found for English and Portuguese might reflect thesesuperficial similarities rather than deeper properties of the learning process. In the currentstudy, we examined Hebrew-speaking children’s knowledge of letter names and comparedthe results with those for U.S. children. Hebrew is of interest because its letter shapes andsystem of letter naming differ substantially from those of the Latin alphabet. If Israeli chil-dren’s learning of letter names is affected by similar factors as in the earlier studies withLatin letters, this would implicate deeper properties of the learning process. In what fol-lows, we discuss the linguistic and cultural factors that may affect Israeli children’s learn-ing of letter names.

The first three columns of Table 1 show the names, shapes, and sounds of the Hebrewletters. Hebrew has four letters ( and ) that sometimes are named differentlydepending on what sounds they make in particular words—differences that are reflectedin the presence or location of a dot in the pointed text that is widely used for young chil-dren. The basic names for these letters are /bet/, /kaf/, /pei/, and /Sin/, but they occasion-ally may be called /vet/, /xaf/, /fei/, and /sin/ when specifically alluding to theirpronunciation as /v/ rather than /b/ and so on.

Another characteristic of Hebrew that is apparent from Table 1 is that certain letters (/kaf/, /mem/, /nun/, /pei/, and /tsadik/) have special shapes when they are found at

Table 1Name(s), shape in font used in the current study, and sound(s) of each Hebrew letter together with replacementerrors that occurred more than 10 times, pooling over younger and older Israeli children, in decreasing order offrequency


the end of a word ( and ). Position-based alternations in shape are not uniqueto Hebrew. In Arabic, most letters have two or three distinct forms depending on theirposition in a word, and the Greek letter sigma, r, has the special form 1 at the end of aword. The names of final letters in Hebrew usually are distinguished from the names ofthe corresponding nonfinal letters by adding the qualifier /sofit/ ‘final’ as in /mem sofit/.(This qualifier is stressed on the second syllable, unlike the basic letter names, all of whichhave first-syllable stress.) The final letters present unusually severe issues with visual iden-tification. Most of them are quite similar to certain other letters, and some of them aredistinguishable from other letters only because they extend a bit below the line ofprint—a cue that was not available in the current study, where children saw letters oneat a time on unruled cards. This, together with the fact that most Hebrew letters do not


have a final version and the fact that the final forms are not separately included in alphabetsongs and early alphabet books, may be responsible for the difficulties that Israeli childrenhave in naming final letters (Levin, Patel, Margalit, & Barad, 2002).

Hebrew differs from English in the phonological properties of its letter names. In English,as in many other languages, letter names typically contain one or two phonemes and aremarkedly shorter than most other words of the language. In Hebrew, many letter namesare disyllabic, and even the monosyllabic names often contain three phonemes. Hebrew letternames are also less phonologically similar to one another than are the letter names of mostother languages. Even when Hebrew letter names share a phoneme, such as the /e/ in /mem/and /bet/, there typically are two or more other unshared phonemes as well. The Hebrewalphabet does not include any large set of highly similar letter names like the English B, C,D, G, P, T, V, and Z, whose names differ only in their initial phoneme, or F, L, M, N, andS, which are identical except for the last phoneme. (The largest such set in Hebrew is bet,tet, and xet.) The letter names of Hebrew are similar to one another in some ways. All disyl-labic names have stress on the first syllable, as mentioned above, and the /CaCeC/ (whereC = consonant) pattern that is found in several letter names is otherwise rare. But the pho-nological similarities among the names are less marked than in many other languages, andthe letter names are not very different from the normal words of the language. Like Greek,Hebrew retains the original Semitic letter names, which are mostly words for concrete objectswhose names begin with the same letters; for example, the name of the letter originally was

/alp/ ‘ox’. Because Hebrew is very similar to the language in which those letter nameswere first developed and has lightly modified the letter names to conform to its own soundsystem, Hebrew letter names sound much like ordinary common nouns. In contrast, theLatin letter names used in English are fundamentally just the letter sounds themselves, usu-ally with a single vowel added to make them more pronounceable.

A look at the letter shapes in Table 1 suggests that the possibilities for visual confusionare not confined to the five word-final letter forms. Most Hebrew letters are formed in ablock-like architecture, with a predominance of very similar horizontal and verticalstrokes. There are few distinctive curves and diagonals as there are with Latin letters.Indeed, several authorities have suggested that Hebrew letters resemble one another morethan do Latin letters (e.g., Sampson, 1985). We examined the effects of this visual similar-ity on children’s letter identification in the current study.

The relations between the names and the sounds of letters are different in Hebrew than inEnglish. Hebrew letter names are generally acrophonic; letter names begin with the soundsthat the letters spell. There are several letters that can represent vowels as well as consonants,as Table 1 shows, but these letters nearly always have the acrophonic pronunciations whenthey occur at the beginning of a word, the position that is most salient to children. In English,in contrast, the names of a few letters do not contain the phonemes that the letters typicallyrepresent. For example, the name of H, /etS/, does not contain /h/. For those letter names thatdo contain the sounds, the sounds may be at the end of the letters’ names, as with M and L,rather than at the beginning. The results of Treiman and colleagues (2006) suggest that youngchildren are not influenced by the sound-symbolizing function of the letters when they firstlearn their names, but this is a factor that could influence them later and so is another differ-ence that needs to be considered in comparing Hebrew with other languages.

In addition to the linguistic differences between the Hebrew and English letter name sys-tems, there are cultural differences in how children in Israel and the United States are exposedto letters and differences in education prior to first grade. In the state schools that serve the


majority of Israeli children, children typically enter a preschool class the September after theyturn 4 years old and enter a kindergarten class a year later. Children enter first grade the fallafter they turn 6 years old, at which time formal literacy instruction begins. Traditionally,teaching of letters prior to first grade was frowned on in Israel. At the time the current datawere collected, most preschools and kindergartens in Israel did not view teaching childrenabout letters as an educational aim. In addition, Israeli and U.S. parents have different atti-tudes. Many U.S. parents feel that their children should be able to identify at least some let-ters when they begin kindergarten. Parents encourage their preschool children to learn thealphabet through activities such as singing the alphabet song, watching educational televi-sion programs, and playing with blocks in the shapes of letters. Many Israeli parents tradi-tionally have placed less emphasis on such activities. For example, although there are Israelialphabet songs, they are not as widespread as the alphabet song in the United States. A smallpercentage of boys attend a school system serving some religious sectors in which they startlearning about letters and reading when they are approximately 3 1

2years old. However, we

did not test children from these schools in the current study.Given the linguistic and cultural differences between Israel and the United States, it is of

interest to compare the letter name knowledge of Israeli children with that of U.S. chil-dren. We assessed Israeli preschoolers’ knowledge of letter names using a procedure sim-ilar to that of Treiman and colleagues (2006), showing children each letter of the alphabetand asking them to provide its name. We compared their results with those of the U.S.children tested by Treiman and colleagues. The current article includes some analyses ofthe U.S. data that were reported previously as well as a number of new analyses thatare parallel to the analyses reported for Hebrew.

Method

Israeli procedure

The Israeli children were shown each letter of the Hebrew alphabet and were asked toprovide the letter’s name. Each letter was printed on a separate unruled card using a boldAharoni font like that I shown in Table 1. The letters were approximately 55 mm high.The cards were presented one at a time in a scrambled order that differed from one childto the next. Several cards with simple drawings on them were interspersed with the letters.Children were asked to name the drawings to provide experiences of success and to pre-serve motivation. Children were tested individually in a quiet location at their school.All 27 Hebrew letters were presented in a single session. The experimenter encouraged chil-dren to give a response to each letter.

Israeli participants

We analyzed data from a total of 645 children recruited from state schools attended byHebrew-speaking preschoolers and kindergartners in Israel. Children were sampled from avariety of preschools and kindergartens that served different socioeconomic classes. Themajority of the schools were located in urban areas, although some were in rural areas.Most of the participants studied in classrooms composed of preschoolers and kindergart-ners, with both age groups being exposed to the same curriculum by the same teacher. For

Table 2Information about groups of Israeli children and U.S. comparison children

Measure Younger Israeli group Older Israeli Group U.S. children

N 325 320 318Mean age 5 years 2 months 6 years 2 months 4 years 8 monthsAge range 3 years 11 months to

5 years 9 months5 years 10 months to6 years 11 months

3 years 11 months to5 years 9 months

Proportion boysa .46 .49 .48Proportion of correct responses

to all letters.41 (.33) .66 (.28) .64 (.36)

Proportion of correct responsesto nonfinal Hebrew letters

.47 (.36) .74 (.29)

Proportion of responses that arenames of letters other than thepresented letter

.26 (.29) .19 (.22) .16 (.24)

Proportion of responses that are‘‘don’t know’’, failures to respond,or nonspecific statements

.28 (.28) .13 (.18) .18 (.28)

Proportion of responses that areof other types

.05 (.15) .02 (.07) .02 (.19)

Note. Standard deviations are in parentheses.a Sex was not recorded for two children in the younger Israeli group and one child in the older Israeli group.


the current analyses, the children were divided using a median split into younger and oldergroups (and one child who was markedly older than the others was eliminated from theanalyses). The left columns of Table 2 provide information about the composition ofthe two Israeli groups.

U.S. comparison children

One of our goals was to compare the results for the Israeli children with the results forthe U.S. children studied by Treiman and colleagues (2006) who were tested with upper-case letters. As the rightmost column of Table 2 shows, the U.S. children were on average6 months younger than the younger group of Israeli children. Despite this, the U.S. chil-dren’s mean proportion of correct responses on the letter-naming task was nearly as highas that for the older group of Israeli children. This outcome likely reflects the cultural dif-ferences discussed earlier: Less stress was put on early learning of letter names in Israel, atthe time our data were collected, than in the United States. The fact that the Israeli chil-dren saw pictures interspersed with the letters, whereas the U.S. children did not, probablyis not responsible for the group difference because the distinction between letter shapes anddrawings is acquired very early (e.g., Tolchinsky-Landsmann & Levin, 1985).

Results

Response types

Israeli children

Table 2 shows the mean proportions of correct responses for the younger and olderIsraeli groups on the total set of 27 letters and on the 22 regular or nonfinal letters. The


minor pronunciation variants that exist for some letter names were counted as correct.Responses to the final letters were coded in both a strict fashion, where the child had toprovide the correct letter name and the descriptor /sofit/ to be counted as correct, anda lenient fashion, where a response omitting /sofit/ was accepted. The two systems yieldedvery similar results, and we report here the results for the lenient system. A previous studyin which 93 Israeli children were asked to name the 22 nonfinal letters, using a proceduresimilar to that used here, found a test–retest reliability of .99 for proportion of correctresponses (Freedman, 2002). (The data from the current study for each letter, togetherwith other details of the results, may be found at http://brettkessler.com/HebrewLetterNames.)

Incorrect responses fell into several categories. One type of error occurred when achild provided the name of another Hebrew letter. For example, a child might misiden-tify /daled/ as /zajin/ . The most common such replacement errors are shown in theright column of Table 1, and we report analyses that examine the factors that are asso-ciated with such errors. ‘‘Don’t know’’ answers, failures to respond, and nonspecificstatements (e.g., ‘‘That looks like a letter from my name’’) were grouped together inanother error category. An additional type of error, which we call ‘‘other’’ errors,included cases in which letters were specifically but incorrectly identified and in whicherrors were not the names of Hebrew letters. For the younger Israeli group, approxi-mately 60% of the errors in the ‘‘other’’ category were numbers. These often were num-bers that were visually similar to the presented letters, for example /exad/ ‘1’ for /nun/and /arba/ ‘4’ for /tsadik/. Such errors reflect visual confusions between elements ofthe letter and number systems. In some cases, children provided numbers that werenot visually similar to the presented letters, suggesting a more general confusion betweenthe symbolic systems of letters and numbers. For the older group, approximately 10% ofthe errors in the ‘‘other’’ category were numbers. An error in this category that wasmore common among the older children than the younger ones involved use of the qual-ifier /sofit/ for a letter that does not have a final form. For both groups, however, errorsthat were real letter names greatly outnumbered specific errors that were not real letternames.

U.S. children

The right column of Table 2 provides comparable data for the U.S. children. Theyshowed a breakdown of response types similar to that of the older Israeli group. Forthe U.S. children, approximately 80% of the errors in the ‘‘other’’ category were numbers.These usually were numbers that were visually similar to the presented letters, for example,two ‘2’ for S.

Correct responses to individual letters

The letters of the alphabet varied a good deal in ease of naming for both English andHebrew. For example, /kaf sofit/ was the hardest letter for both the younger and oldergroups of Israeli children, and /alef/ was the easiest letter for both groups. In this sec-tion, we report regression analyses in which we attempted to predict performance on eachletter from various factors. Several factors related to the letters themselves, such as theirfrequencies, were considered in these analyses.

http://brettkessler.com/HebrewLetterNames

http://brettkessler.com/HebrewLetterNames


Israeli children

Letters that are seen and discussed most often may be learned more rapidly. We usedthe frequency of each letter in printed texts as one measure of general frequency. We rea-soned that children would see the common letters more often and that parents and teach-ers would be more likely to discuss such letters with them. The letter frequency data weused were from Wintner and Yona (2003) and were based on newswire feeds from anIsraeli radio station. We used this source because frequency norms based on large samplesof printed material for Israeli children were not available. The frequencies were log trans-formed to make the distribution more normal. We hypothesized that children would bemore familiar with /alef/ and /bet/ than with the other letters because the Hebrewalphabet is called the /alef-bet/. Children hear these letter names especially often andmay see the corresponding shapes often as well, for example if they ask adults to showthem letters whose names they know. Thus, a second variable coded /alef/ and /bet/as 1 and coded other letters as 0. A third variable singled out the word-final letters ofHebrew. The final letters have some special characteristics that were expected to makethem difficult to learn, as discussed earlier.

Simultaneous multiple regression analyses were performed using the data from eachgroup of Israeli children. We analyzed the data both including and excluding the final let-ters. The results, shown in Table 3, indicate that frequent letters were significantly morelikely to be named correctly than were less frequent letters. Performance on /alef/ and

/bet/ was significantly better than anticipated given the frequencies of these letters intexts. Also, performance on final letters was significantly worse than was expected onthe basis of other factors, confirming the findings of Levin and colleagues (2002). Thethree variables considered in the regressions accounted for the majority of the variancein letter-naming difficulty.

U.S. children

Similar analyses were carried out for the U.S. children; such analyses were not reportedpreviously by Treiman and colleagues (2006). The measure of letter frequency was thatused by Treiman and colleagues and was based on frequencies of letters in books designedfor young children. We anticipated that children would perform well on A, B, and C

Table 3Standardized regression coefficients for variables in regressions predicting correct responses on letters for Israelichildren

Variable or measure Analyses excluding final letters Analyses including final letters

Younger group Older group Younger group Older group

Letter frequency .37* .42* .24* .21*

Letter /alef/ or /bet/ .61*** .55** .39*** .27**

Final letter — — �.72*** �.82***

R2 for regression .60 (.56)*** .57 (.53)*** .83 (.80)*** .85 (.83)***

Note. Adjusted R2 values are in parentheses.* p < .05.

** p < .01.*** p < .001.

Table 4Standardized regression coefficients for variables in regressions predicting correct responses on letters for U.S.children

Variable or measure Value

Letter frequency .05Letter A, B, or C .44**

Letter X or O .73***

R2 for regression .65 (.60)***

Note. Adjusted R2 value is in parentheses.** p < .01.

*** p < .001.


because the alphabet often is called the ABCs and because these letters are especially wellrepresented in informal and formal alphabet teaching. Thus, another variable coded A, B,and C as 1 and coded other letters as 0. A third variable distinguished X and O from theother letters. This variable was included because X and O are basic shapes that typicallyare labeled with the names of those letters in English. For example, a child may have heard/o/ used to describe the shape of a piece of cereal, and this may boost the child’s perfor-mance on the letter O. Hebrew letters do not include any comparable cases.

As the results in Table 4 show, the U.S. children performed significantly better thanwould be expected on A, B, and C. They also performed better on X and O. The relationbetween letter frequency in texts and proportion of correct responses, although in theexpected positive direction, was not statistically significant.

Replacement errors

The analyses of correct responses to individual letters consider the properties of lettersthemselves, not their relations with other letters. To gain more insight into these relations,and to shed light on the specific errors that children made, we examined the children’sreplacement errors. For example, /zajin/ is one of the least frequent letters in Hebrewand gave rise to a higher than average number of errors, and it is of interest to examinethe specific errors that children made on this letter and other letters. One relatively com-mon error on was /nun/, the name of a visually similar letter, . To examine visual sim-ilarity and other factors that may be associated with replacement errors, we tabulated thenumber of errors on each letter that involved each other letter as a response. This wasdone separately for the younger and older groups of Israeli children. Multiple regressionanalyses were performed to predict the number of confusions on each of the stimulus–re-sponse pairs, where stimulus refers to the letter that the children saw and response refers tothe erroneous letter name that the children said. For example, we tabulated the number oferrors on /alef/ where children said /bet/, /gimel/, /daled/, and so on and similarly foreach other letter. Because the raw data on number of confusions did not conform to a nor-mal distribution, log-transformed data were used in the analyses.

Israeli children

A number of predictor variables were included in the regression analyses for the Israelichildren. One variable was designed to capture the visual similarity between the stimulus


and response letters in each pair. This was expected to contribute to children’s replacementerrors, as with the confusions of and mentioned earlier. To obtain a measure of visualsimilarity, we had 30 Israeli college students rate the visual similarity of all pairs of letterson a scale from 1 (not at all similar) to 7 (very similar). We used 10 different random ordersof the pairs, and three participants were assigned to each order. Across participants, halfof the students saw the letters of a pair in one order (e.g., ) and half saw them in the otherorder ( ). The letters were presented in the same font that was used with the children.1

These procedures were the same as those used by Treiman and colleagues (2006) when col-lecting similar rating data from U.S. students, and the number of Israeli raters was thesame as the number of raters in the U.S. study. The regression analyses that we reportfor Hebrew used the Israeli ratings, log transformed to make their distribution morenormal.

Letters were coded as having phonologically similar names if either the basic or alter-nate forms of the names included a shared phoneme among their first two phonemes.Shared phonemes beyond the initial two were not credited in light of evidence that initialphonemes generally contribute to phonological proximity more strongly than do laterphonemes (Monsell & Hirsh, 1998). All rhyming letter names in Hebrew as well as Englishshare a phoneme within the first two positions, and so this coding scheme is compatiblewith the elevated similarity ratings that people typically give to rhymes (e.g., Nelson &Nelson, 1970). Also, all disyllabic Hebrew letter names have stress on the first syllable.

We also coded whether the stimulus and response letters were adjacent to one anotherin the Hebrew alphabet. As mentioned previously, Israeli children sometimes are exposedto songs and alphabet books in which the 22 basic letters of the alphabet are presented inorder. We anticipated that children sometimes might confuse letters that are next to oneanother in the alphabet. Final letters are not separately included in alphabet songs andbeginning alphabet books, and so these letters were not coded as adjacent to any otherletters.

For each stimulus–response pair, we coded both the frequency of the stimulus letter andthe frequency of the response letter. The letter frequency data from Wintner and Yona(2003) were used for this purpose, log transformed to make the distribution more normal.We also coded whether the stimulus letter in each pair was /alef/ or /bet/ and whetherthe response letter was /alef/ or /bet/.

The number of syllables in the stimulus letter and the number of syllables in theresponse letter were additional variables. We ignored the /sofit/ in the coding of syllablelength for final letters. Disyllabic letter names contain more phonemes than monosyllabicletter names, and this greater complexity might mean that children would produce disyl-labic letter names less often. On the other hand, most Hebrew words are longer than a sin-gle syllable, and this could lead to an advantage for disyllabic letter names. In the analyses

1 A potential concern with the use of rating data from Hebrew speakers is that even though the participantswere asked to rate the visual similarity of the letters, their ratings could have been affected by knowledge of theletters’ names, sounds, or idealized shapes. To address this issue, we collected rating data from U.S. collegestudents who were not familiar with Hebrew. With an average of 28 U.S. participants rating each letter pair, theratings by Hebrew speakers and English speakers correlated highly (r = .86). This correlation gives us reason tobelieve that the ratings of the Israeli participants reflect, for the most part, characteristics of letters’ visual formsthat are salient regardless of a viewer’s familiarity with the letters. The regression analyses we report use theHebrew speakers’ ratings of visual similarity to be parallel with the analyses of the U.S. data, which use theEnglish speakers’ ratings of visual similarity.


that included the final letters, we also included variables for whether the stimulus letterand the response letter in each pair was a final letter.

The variables just described were included in the first stage of the regression analysis. Ina second stage, we asked whether adding the interaction between visual similarity and pho-nological similarity accounted for significant additional variance, as it did for English andPortuguese in the study of Treiman and Colleagues’ (2006).

Table 5 shows the results of the regressions for the younger and older Israeli groups.Results are shown for both analyses including the final letters and analyses excludingthe final letters. The results shown in Table 5 are for the first stage of the regressions,before the interaction term involving visual similarity and name similarity was included.This interaction did not account for significant additional variance in any of the analyses.

The regression results reveal that children tended to make more replacement errorswhen they were shown final letters than when they were shown nonfinal letters. Thiswas true for both the younger and older children. This outcome is consistent with the ear-lier findings that errors of all types were more common on final letters than on nonfinalletters. Incorrect responses that were letter names tended not to have the /sofit/ descriptor,accounting for the negative association between final letter responses and replacementerrors. This held true for both the younger and older children. These effects were ratherlarge, explaining why the proportion of variance accounted for by the regressions washigher when the final letters were included in the analyses than when they were excluded.

Among the other variables, visual similarity played the largest role for both the youngerand older Israeli children. Children were more likely to confuse letters that looked similarto one another than to confuse letters that looked less similar. As mentioned previously,for example, /nun/ was a relatively common error on /zajin/. Confusions involving lesssimilar letters, such as /nun/ and /samex/, were less common.

Table 5Standardized regression coefficients for variables in regressions predicting confusions between pairs of letters forIsraeli children

Variable or measure Analyses excluding final letters Analyses including final letters

Younger group Older group Younger group Older group

Visual similarity of letters’ shapes .27*** .27*** .27*** .29***

Phonological similarity of letters’ names .01 .11* –.03 .03Adjacency of letters in alphabet .10* .15*** .07* .12***

Stimulus letter frequency �.06 �.15*** �.05 �.11**

Response letter frequency .23*** .01 .20*** .01Stimulus @ /alef/ or i /bet/ �.16*** �.24*** �.10** �.16***

Response /alef/ or /bet/ .15*** �.09* .12*** �.09**

Number of syllables in stimulus letter �.02 �.03 .02 �.01Number of syllables in response letter .11* .03 .10** .02Stimulus final letter — — .11*** .15***

Response final letter — — �.48*** �.35***

R2 for regression .21 (.19)*** .23 (.21)*** .42 (.41)*** .31 (.30)***

Note. Adjusted R2 values are in parentheses.* p < .05.

** p < .01.*** p < .001.


Phonological similarity had a significant effect on the older group when the final letterswere excluded from the analyses. However, the effect of phonological similarity was nolonger significant when the final letters were included. Given the lack of consistent find-ings, we cannot conclude with certainty that phonological similarity was influential forthe older Israeli group. Phonological similarity was not significantly associated with con-fusions for the younger group, according to the results shown in Table 5. Thus, althoughthe Israeli children tended to confuse letters with similar shapes, there is no strong evi-dence that they confused letters with similar names.

Replacement errors that involved letters that were adjacent to one another in the alpha-bet were significantly more common than was expected on the basis of other factors. Thiswas true for both groups of children, although the effect of adjacency appeared to bestronger for the older group than for the younger group.

Stimulus letter frequency and response letter frequency played different roles for theyounger and older Israeli children. The frequency of the response letters was influentialfor the younger children: The erroneous letter names that they produced tended to becommon letter names. These children apparently were more familiar with the namesof common letters, such as /reS/, than of less common letters, such as /pei/, andso were more likely to produce the former than the latter. The older children did notshow a significant effect of response letter frequency, but they did show a significanteffect of stimulus letter frequency. They were less likely to make replacement errors whenshown common letters than when shown uncommon letters. This effect of stimulus letterfrequency was not significant for replacement errors for the younger group. The youngerchildren made more errors in general on uncommon letters than on common ones (Table3), but their errors on uncommon letters often were ‘‘don’t know’’. This was confirmedby an additional regression analysis carried out on ‘‘don’t know’’ errors on individualletters.

Even after letter frequency was considered, both groups of children tended to makefewer replacement errors on /alef/ and /bet/, the letters whose names form the nameof the Hebrew alphabet, than on other letters. This result fits with the finding that childrenmade fewer total errors on /alef/ and /bet/ than on other letters (Table 3). The youngerchildren also showed a significant tendency to say /alef/ and /bet/ as erroneous responses,labeling other letters by these names when they could not name the letters correctly. Thisresult probably reflects the children’s familiarity with the names /alef/ and /bet/. The chil-dren knew that these phonological forms belong to the correct response set in a letter-nam-ing task. The older children showed the opposite result. They were less likely than wasexpected, on the basis of other factors, to say /alef/ and /bet/ in error. In addition to beingfamiliar with the names /alef/ and /bet/, the older children probably were quite familiarwith the shapes that correspond to these names. As a result, the older children did notoften mistakenly identify letters with other shapes as /alef/ or /bet/.

The number of syllables in the stimulus letter was not associated with replacementerrors. However, the younger children were significantly more likely to produce incorrectresponses that were disyllabic letter names than to produce incorrect responses that weremonosyllabic letter names. This outcome may reflect the fact that, as mentioned earlier,words of more than one syllable are more typical of Hebrew than are monosyllabic words.The younger children, searching for legitimate responses in the letter-naming task, mayhave favored disyllables over monosyllables, just as they favored /alef/ and /bet/ and com-mon letter names.


Additional analyses, not shown in Table 5, indicated that variables that reflect similar-ities in the sound-symbolizing functions of letters in a pair did not generally contribute tothe regressions. These analyses considered whether the two letters agree in whether theyusually are pronounced and in whether they can represent a vowel, as well as in whetherthe two letters can represent the same phoneme.

U.S. children

Table 6 shows the results of a regression analysis on the U.S. data. Recall that the U.S.children were younger, on average, than the younger Israeli group but that they performedat approximately the same level as the older Israeli group. The analysis shown in Table 6 issimilar, but not identical, to the one reported by Treiman and colleagues (2006). The maindifference is that the current analysis included a variable representing whether the stimulusletter was X or O—basic shapes whose names are used in other contexts—and a variablerepresenting whether the response letter was X or O. These variables were includedbecause, as demonstrated previously, children know the names of X and O better thanwould be expected on the basis of other factors. The same transformations that wereapplied to the variables in the Hebrew analysis were also used in the U.S. analysis. Wedid not include variables reflecting the number of syllables in the stimulus and responseletters for English, as we did for Hebrew, because only one English letter has a name ofmore than one syllable. In the English analysis, inclusion of a variable reflecting the inter-action between visual similarity and phonological similarity led to a significant increase inthe proportion of variance explained (p = .019), as Treiman and colleagues also found.The results depicted in Table 6 are from the second stage of the regression, when the inter-action term was included.

For the U.S. children, as for the Israeli children, visual similarity was the major deter-minant of replacement errors. However, the U.S. children were affected by phonologicalsimilarity as well in that they tended to confuse letters that had similar names as well as

Table 6Standardized regression coefficients for variables in second stage of regression predicting confusions betweenpairs of letters for U.S. comparison children

Variable or measure Value

Visual similarity of letters’ shapes .30***

Phonological similarity of letters’ names .00Visual similarity · phonological similarity .22*

Adjacency of letters in alphabet .12***

Stimulus letter frequency �.03Response letter frequency .08*

Stimulus A, B, or C �.13***

Response A, B, or C .10**

Stimulus X or O �.15***

Response X or O .01R2 for regression .25 (.24)***

Note. Adjusted R2 value is in parentheses.* p < .05.

** p < .01.*** p < .001.


similar shapes. For example, they confused B /bi/ with D /di/. Recall that effects of pho-nological similarity were at best weak for the Israeli children, and there was no interactionbetween phonological similarity and visual similarity for either the younger or older Israeligroup.

The U.S. children, like the Israeli children, confused letters that were adjacent to oneanother in the alphabet more often than was anticipated on the basis of other factors.The U.S. children also had some tendency to respond with common letter names and withthe names of A, B, and C. These tendencies were similar to those seen among the youngIsraeli children. In addition, as anticipated on the basis of the results in Table 4, the U.S.children tended to make fewer replacement errors than was expected on the basis of otherfactors when they were shown X and O, the names of which children are likely to learnoutside the letter-naming context.

Effects of children’s own names

In the analyses reported so far, the data were pooled across children. This allows us tolook at one aspect of letter frequency, namely general frequency effects that hold acrosschildren. However, it does not allow us to look at frequency effects that are specific to indi-vidual children. One factor that is specific to individual children concerns the letters in thechildren’s own names. To examine how performance may differ as a function of the lettersin children’s names, we tabulated the results for each letter for children who had that letteras the first letter of their first names or commonly used nicknames, children who had thatletter only in a noninitial position of their first names, and children who did not have theletter in their first names. The results are shown in Table 7. The Israeli results are pooledover the younger and older groups to increase reliability; additional analyses revealed thatthe younger and older children showed similar patterns of performance as a function ofown-name membership, although the older children produced more correct responses thandid the younger children. To ensure that the proportions could be calculated reliably,Table 7 and the corresponding analyses are based on only those letters for which thedenominator used in calculating the proportion of correct responses was greater than 9for each position category. There were 15 such letters for the Israeli children, pooling overthe younger and older age groups, and 9 for the smaller group of U.S. children.

An analysis of variance (ANOVA) using the factors of position (initial in name, later inname, or not in name) and language (Hebrew or English) showed a main effect of position,F(2, 44) = 46.67, p < .001. Performance was best if the letter was in the initial position ofthe name, intermediate if it appeared later in the name, and poorest if it was not in thename. Each of these differences was significant. Levin and Aram (2004) hypothesized thatthe initial letter of the name is more salient for children learning English than for childrenlearning Hebrew because the initial letters of names are capitalized in English but not in

Table 7Mean proportions of correct responses as a function of position of letters in children’s names for Israeli children(younger and older groups pooled) and U.S. comparison children

Position Israeli groups U.S. group

Initial position in first name .77 .86Later position in first name .70 .71Not in first name .60 .63


Hebrew and because first names tend to be longer in English than in Hebrew. Consistentwith this hypothesis, the advantage for the first letter in the name over the later letters wasnumerically larger in English than in Hebrew. However, the interaction between positionand language was not statistically significant in the ANOVA.

Sex differences

We carried out a final set of analyses to ask whether boys and girls differed in ability toname visually presented letters. Among the U.S. and Brazilian children tested by Treimanand colleagues (2006), girls tended to know more letter names than did boys. However, thedifferences between boys and girls were not statistically significant for either country. Sexdifferences were also observed among the Israeli children tested here, and these were sta-tistically significant. For the full group of Israeli children, the proportions of correctresponses were .56 for girls and .51 for boys. This difference was significant at the .01 levelby a Monte Carlo test with 10,000 rearrangements. This test was used, as it was in thestudy of Treiman and colleagues’, because the data were not normally distributed. Signif-icant differences were also observed when the final letters were omitted.

Discussion

Children in many countries begin to learn about the shapes and names of letters wellbefore the onset of formal reading instruction. They use their knowledge of letters, togeth-er with their phonological skills, to try to make sense of writing (e.g., Foulin, 2005). Giventhe role of letter names in bridging the gap between speech and print, it is important tounderstand the factors that are involved in early learning of letter names. We addressedthis issue in the current study by examining children’s learning of Hebrew, an alphabetthat is quite different from the Latin alphabet that has figured in most previous research.The current results, together with our earlier findings (Treiman et al., 2006), suggest thatletter name learning follows similar principles across languages and cultures. Children ini-tially learn the names of letters in much the same way as they learn other vocabularywords. The learning plays out in a way that is molded by the characteristics of the letternames in a particular language, and the specific letters that children confuse differ fromone language to another. The underlying principles, however, are similar across languages.

In Israel and the United States, as in Brazil, preschoolers’ errors in naming letters oftenare the names of other letters. This result suggests that an important first step in learningabout letter names is identifying the names as a set. In languages such as English, this iden-tification may be facilitated by the phonological similarities among the names of letters.For example, many English letter names are two-phoneme syllables that end with /i/ orbegin with /e/. The phonological similarities among Hebrew letter names are much lessmarked, and yet the Israeli children also were more likely to call a letter by the name ofanother letter than by some other label. Other factors, such as adults’ tendency to talkabout letters in particular settings and to use letter names in close sequence, likely playan important role in helping children to identify letter names as a set. Identification ofthe letter name set may begin with the letters that are conventionally used to label thisset—/alef/ and /bet/ in Hebrew and /e/, /bi/, and /si/ in English—as shown by the youngerchildren’s tendency to produce these letter names as errors.


When children mistakenly call one letter by the name of another letter, the letters thatthey confuse often are similar to one another in shape. The letter shapes are different in theHebrew and Latin alphabets, but the shape-based confusions that occur in both alphabetsare similar in principle. Visually based confusions have been found in the learning of othervocabulary words as well (e.g., Clark, 1993), supporting the idea that children learn thelabels for letters in much the same way as they learn the labels for other concrete objects.

Although visual similarity of letter shapes had similar effects on the Israeli and U.S.children, phonological similarity of letter names had stronger effects on the U.S. children.The different effects of phonological similarity in Israeli and U.S. children probably reflectthe different characteristics of letter names in Hebrew and English. As we have mentioned,Hebrew does not contain the relatively large sets of phonologically similar letter namesthat English does and so offers fewer opportunities for name-based confusions. Within-category errors based on phonological similarity may be common for those categoriesin a language that have a high degree of phonological similarity, as with letter names inEnglish and many other languages. Such errors may be less common when words in a cat-egory sound little alike, as with letter names in Hebrew, color words in English, and thewords in many other semantic categories.

A dimension of similarity that affected both Israeli and U.S. children involved the orderof letters in the alphabet. Children in both countries were significantly more likely to con-fuse letters that were next to one another in the conventional sequence than was anticipat-ed on the basis of other factors. Letters such as F and G may become associated with oneanother because they are next to one another in alphabet songs and alphabet books. Chil-dren who often experience letters in such contexts sometimes may confuse adjacent lettersfor these reasons. We know of no previous research that asked whether confusions thatreflect the dimension of order occur for other categories that have an intrinsic orderingthat is salient to children, for example the category of numbers. If so, this would supportthe idea that the same principles affect the learning of letters and other items.

Because the link between a letter shape and its name is arbitrary, just like the linksbetween other objects and their labels, we would expect to see frequency effects in learning.The Israeli children produced more correct responses when shown /alef/ and /bet/ thanwas expected on the basis of other factors, and the U.S. children produced more correctresponses for A, B, and C. We interpret these effects as reflecting children’s frequent expo-sure to the letters whose names label the alphabet. Similarly, the U.S. children probablyperformed well on X and O because they encounter these shapes and names both outsideand within the letter-learning context, boosting frequency of exposure. In both Israel andthe United States, children did especially well on the letters of their own first names, par-ticularly the initial letters of their names. These letters often are seen and discussed by chil-dren. For example, mothers sometimes teach children how to spell other words byreferring to the letters in children’s own names (Levin & Aram, 2004). Together, theseresults show that frequency of exposure affects the learning of letter names, as it doesthe learning of other vocabulary words (e.g., Schwartz & Terrell, 1983). The results furthershow that children’s own names play an important role in learning to read and write (e.g.,Levin & Aram, 2004; Treiman & Broderick, 1998; Villaume & Wilson, 1989), just as theydo in learning to speak and listen (Bortfeld, Morgan, Golinkoff, & Rathbun, 2005; Man-del, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995).

We found somewhat different results for Israeli and U.S. children when we examinedhow letter-naming performance was associated with letter frequency in text. The Israeli


children produced significantly more correct responses for letters that are common in textsthan for letters that are less common, and the younger Israeli children seemed more likelyto identify frequent letters as members of the appropriate response set. For the U.S. chil-dren, these effects were weak and generally not statistically significant. The apparent dif-ferences must be interpreted with caution, in part because the frequency counts forHebrew and English were computed in different ways. If the differences are real, one pos-sible explanation centers on the fact that our U.S. participants tend to learn letter names ata younger age than do our Israeli participants. For young children, personal and idiosyn-cratic factors may play a large role in learning. For example, the letters that are discussedat home may be primarily letters from family members’ names. Older preschoolers may bemore likely than younger preschoolers to notice and discuss letters that appear in books(Williamson, Evans, & Pursoo, 2005), in which case text frequency may play a larger rolefor children who learn letter names at an older age.

Studies of vocabulary learning generally have found small advantages for girls overboys (e.g., Feldman et al., 2000). In the learning of letter names as well, girls often areat a small advantage. In the previous study of U.S. and Brazilian children (Treimanet al., 2006), preschool girls knew about one more letter on average than did boys. Thesex difference in means was not statistically reliable, although boys showed significantlymore variability. In the larger Israeli sample of the current study, girls knew about 11

2more

letters on average than did boys, and the sex difference was statistically significant. In theseenvironments, then, more boys than girls appear to enter reading instruction lacking someimportant background knowledge. However, these sex differences are not immutable.Deutsch (1998) tested Israeli boys who attended the previously mentioned school systemserving some religious sectors in which teaching about letters and reading begins atapproximately 3 1

2years of age. These boys outperformed girls from similar backgrounds

who were not taught about letters and reading from such an early age. Thus, providingmore intensive teaching to boys can nullify the typically observed sex differences and evenchange their direction.

When children are first learning about the shapes and names of letters, they may notunderstand that letters symbolize sounds. Consequently, their errors are little influencedby the letters’ sound-symbolizing functions. As children master letter names and learn thatletters represent sounds, they can use the iconicity of the letter names to help learn andremember the letters’ sounds. The acrophonic nature of Hebrew letter names means thatspeakers of this language potentially have much to gain from knowledge of letter names.To realize these benefits, it may be important for children to know the names of the lettersbefore they begin learning to read and write. Teaching of letter names to preschoolers wasnot considered to be an important educational goal in Israel at the time the data for thecurrent study were collected, but the situation has begun to change recently. Curricula for3- to 6-year-olds that emphasize letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and early spell-ing are now being developed and implemented in Israel. For example, children are taughtabout the letters in their own names, as well as in classmates’ names, and play games withcards on which letters are written. The current data on which Hebrew letters are easier andharder to learn, and on which confusions are most likely to occur, can be useful in thedesign of such instruction. In our experience, teachers and parents in Israel and the UnitedStates are quite aware of children’s difficulties with visually similar letters. The other fac-tors that influence letter name learning are less apparent to adults but are important forchildren.


Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant (BCS-0130763)and the Chief Scientist Competition of the Israeli Ministry of Education. We thank ReutAram, Margo Bowman, Rochelle Evans, Shira Patinkin, and Shannon Ross for theirassistance.

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